I like this band, even with the doofy sunglasses. They’re from Lincoln, NE, and they have an album called Teen Challenge that I’ve only ever seen CD-R copies of with simple homestyle screen-printed sleeves, but I’ve listened to it a bunch of times and I like it a lot, and I think I heard that you can get it on vinyl now. Then again, they also said on twitter that they’re a 12-piece now, and I’m having a difficult time picturing that.
The other day I received an e-mail informing me that the music website garageband.com (which predates the Apple music software that bears its namesake by some years) will be discontinued effective July 15.
Garageband.com was an interesting concept in new-music-discovery at a time, just after the Napster mess and the death of mp3.com, when folks were up for trying just about anything. The concept was this: musicians upload songs; then people go, listen to songs chosen at random, and submit reviews of them, and via the ratings you give, songs are ranked. Artists whose songs topped the rankings would receive such prizes as music gear, or the grand prize, a signing with garageband.com’s own record label. To ensure some level of participation, as well as to avoid people uploading a glut of stuff just to see what might stick, musicians earned their uploads by doing reviews. If you weren’t a musician, your motivation for doing reviews was, I guess, to discover some new artists you might like.
Of course nowadays, and in hindsight, it’s easy to look at this model and understand why it didn’t really work that well. For instance just about the whole userbase was struggling musicians, reviewing each other, or if you want to look at it this way, reviewing their competition. For one thing, the musical taste of musicians, as a group, tends to differ from that of the general public. Also, reviewers were required to include a short paragraph about what they thought of the song, and the reviews were actually themselves reviewed by the artists, supposedly in order to keep people sincere. But in reality it just ended up being overcomplicated. Most people don’t want to have to explain why they liked a song after they hear it, especially not the very first time they hear it. But many of the changes to the landscape of the music business that we now have become pretty much used to were in those days pretty unresolved and nobody had any idea what the shape of the music business was going to look like once the dust settled, so garageband.com seemed as viable a concept as anything anyone else was trying. These days the garageband.com folks are behind iLike, and it appears they’ve finally decided which venture is working out better.
I was a member on garageband.com for a long time, uploaded quite a bit of No Consensus and Exit Drills stuff, and hung out in the site’s forums, which is were I think the real win was there. Those forums had a really great community. Eventually I drifted away, but I communicated with some really great fellow musicians on garageband.com, had a lot of laughs, and even discovered a couple really good bands. One of those bands was The Nuevos.
Shortly after reading the email notice that garageband.com was closing up, I got about 20 automated messages from the site of a kind that you can sign up for to be notified what a band you like has uploaded new songs, telling me that The Nuevos had somehow just uploaded about 20 songs to garageband.com all at once. Wow. I had just about forgotten about The Nuevos, whom I had even had some mail correspondence with at one time, from which I still have a CD-R of some of their early demos, but it was crazy having not had any news about them for so long, and suddenly they hear that garageband.com is closing down so they decide to upload 20 damn songs to it. I haven’t listened to them yet, but I plan to and you should too because The Nuevos are pretty good. They’re all downloadable too, it looks like.
Isn’t this just like me, I come up with a concept for something and immediately I’m breaking the very formula I came up with. I started the “The Centipede Tapes” category to post odd obscure stuff from my large cassette tape collection, and here I am posting something I don’t have on cassette at all. Rather, I have in my possession two artifacts pertaining to this band called The Trouble With Larry: this 1992 self-titled CD and a 7″ containing two songs from it (“Otto Mesmer” / “The Rodent Song”) and I was pleased to find a download of the album on some blog called The Thinner The Air, so I decided to post it here.
Whoever The Trouble With Larry were, they made an intriguing album full of jerky rhythms, scratchy/twangy guitars, declamatory vocals with gimmicky black-humor lyrics, and they somehow managed to make a drum machine sound loose, even a bit sloppy (in a cool way). It sounds like some kind of cross between Big Black, X, and Devo. Maybe a little Gang Of Four too.
Check the above-linked post for slightly (though not much) more info on the band and album, and download it off Mediafire at this link.
I’ve been listening to this a bunch lately and thought I’d share it. Olde Growth, who I heard about randomly somewhere online, is a bass/drums two-piece. I have a bit of a thing for bands with that kind of lineup ever since I saw godHeadSilo in the basement of the Black Hawk Labor Temple in Waterloo in ’94. (In fact, I’m interested in a drummer for Distant Trains if any of my drumming friends are interested in getting in on that.) The sound is heavy sludge doom kind of like a backwoodsy Electric Wizard. They’re giving the download of this album out for free at http://oldegrowth.bandcamp.com and I found a web site for the band at http://www.oldegrowth.com/. No word on whether you can get it on CD but the cover art looks like a screen-printed rough cardboard sleeve so I suspect such an artifact does in fact exist.
Just out today the latest video, number 8 in the weekly Coolzey and the Search for Hip-hop Hearts series, is drop-dead hilarious. A must-see.
Today’s “Centipede Tapes” doesn’t come from my collection directly, because I’m in the process of moving and my cassette collection is mostly packed up in boxes. But I do Sludgeplow’s other cassette, 1994′s EveryTHING, and I plan to post that one sometime in the future, but while I was looking around for info I came across a download of their 1992 tape Turned Earth elsewhere. Specifically, here.
Sludgeplow was a sludge-rock (of course) band from Iowa in the early ’90s. I never had the fortune to see them play live, but I liked the EveryTHING tape that I have quite a bit. Two of the band members went off to California and formed the band Archons. Sludgeplow even have page on Encyclopedia Metallum. Sorry I couldn’t find a larger cover art image to use.
Standard Centipede Tapes disclaimer: I didn’t ask anybody permission for anything.
It’s my birthday, and I’ve got a present for you. You can probably tell how old I am now from its title. Don’t make me say it out loud. This album is a collection of stuff I didn’t put on the other albums — but that needed to get off my consciousness and off my mind to prepare for the next phase of whatever. It all makes for kind of a cool album, actually.
Listen and download here. When it asks how much you want to pay for it, don’t feel the least bit bad about entering 0 if that’s what you want to do.
Glam-Racket has this really cool post about Gonn, the 1960s garage-rock band from Keokuk, IA that wrote and recorded “Blackout of Gretely,” rediscovered by punk rockers in the ’80s and now considered a proto-punk touchstone, and which can be found on the Nuggets box set (as well as the posthumous compilation The Loudest Band In Town). Also check out the follow-up post with the video of The Fuzztones covering “Blackout of Gretely.”
I need to keep more on top of things worth posting here. Anyway, my old buddy and former bandmate Stacy Peck used to play drums in this band out in Seattle called Telepathic Liberation Army, and while she was doing that, they recorded an album, and that album is out now on Don’t Stop Believin’ Records. Get it here. I’ve heard rough mixes of a couple songs and it’s badass stuff.
And if you’re interested in what Stacy gets up to since, check out Pony Time. Word is they’re working on a cassette album.
Lou Barlow is kind of one of my personal heroes. I love his songwriting, his voice, his distinctive bass playing in Dinosaur Jr., and just his general approach to his various musical projects, whether it be Sebadoh or Sentridoh or Folk Implosion or solo stuff or whatever. Dude keeps it real.
I’m pretty sure I drove right past him, walking down the street, crossing a bridge in Minneapolis, just after the Dinosaur Jr. show I went to up there a couple years ago, a block or two down the street from the venue. It sure looked like him. To this day one of my biggest regrets is that I didn’t stop the car and offer him a ride. If it was indeed him. I should have at least checked.
Anyway Lou’s got a new record out on Merge called “= Sentridoh III” that I’m really interested in, wherein he’s teamed up with The Missingmen, the same group of guys who have lately backed up another personal musical hero of mine, Mike Watt. I’m not sure if Watt is himself in involved with the project, how bad-ass would that be?
But in any case, what I’ve heard/seen of this sounds great. And what that is, is this free mp3 from Merge of the new EP’s re-make of the classic Sentridoh song “Losercore,” and this video for “On The Face”:
Lou Barlow + the missingmen – On The Face from Merge Records on Vimeo.
